20 Facts About Samuel Bentham

Brigadier General Sir Samuel Bentham was an English mechanical engineer and naval architect credited with numerous innovations, particularly related to naval architecture, including weapons.

Samuel Bentham was the only surviving sibling of philosopher Jeremy Bentham, with whom he had a close bond.

Samuel Bentham was one of two surviving children of Jeremiah Bentham.

Samuel Bentham's father was an attorney, and his older brother was the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, five other siblings having died in infancy or early childhood, and their mother dying in 1766.

At the age of 14, Bentham was apprenticed to a shipwright at Woolwich Dockyard, serving there and at Chatham Dockyard, before completing his 7-year training at the Naval Academy in Portsmouth.

Samuel Bentham designed and constructed many novel inventions, including an amphibious vessel and an articulated barge built for Catherine the Great, and the first Panopticon.

Samuel Bentham was decorated for his part in a decisive victory in the war against the Turks, and commanded a battalion of 1,000 men in Siberia.

Samuel Bentham eventually came to have complete responsibility for Potemkin's factories and workshops, and it was while considering the difficulties of supervising the large workforce that he devised the principle of central inspection, and designed the Panopticon building which would embody that principle and was later popularized by his brother Jeremy.

In 1782 Samuel Bentham travelled along the Siberian route to China, visiting Kyakhta and its Chinese pendant Naimatchin, and then spending over a month at the border fluvial city of Nerchinsk, where he was able to study Chinese ship designs, particularly those of junks.

Samuel Bentham returned to England in 1791, and for the next few years was involved with his brother Jeremy in trying to promote the Panopticon scheme and he designed machinery for use in it.

Samuel Bentham produced a great many suggestions for improvements, which included the introduction of steam power to the dockyards and the mechanisation of many production processes.

Samuel Bentham is credited with helping to revolutionise the production of the wooden pulley blocks used in ships' rigging, devising woodworking machinery to improve production efficiency.

Marc Isambard Brunel had independently conceived designs for mortising and boring machines, which he showed to Samuel Bentham, who recognized the superiority of Brunel's designs.

In 1805 Samuel Bentham returned to Russia, this time on government business, and remained there for two years with his family, chartering an entire ship to take his establishment, his servants and his companions.

Samuel Bentham designed a full cast-iron nine-arch bridge for the Butterly company, for Vauxhall Bridge in London, which would have been the first iron-built bridge over the Thames.

Samuel Bentham discovered upon his return to England that his post as Inspector General had been abolished while he was absent, and indeed came to believe that he had been sent to Russia solely to get him out of the way while the post was abolished.

The Samuel Bentham family travelled a great deal in France before settling in 1820 at the Chateau de Restinclieres, in the region of Languedoc-Roussillon.

Samuel Bentham imported agricultural machinery as yet unknown in France, and installed a complex system of irrigation on his land.

In England, Samuel Bentham spent most of his time writing about naval matters, and conducting experiments on hull shapes.

Samuel Bentham's son George Bentham, born in 1800, became a noted botanist.